| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. David Winnick (Walsall, North): There were one or two points in the speech of the hon. Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) to which I shall refer in the course of my own.
I expect that if the war were continuing, we would be having a somewhat different debate today and a far greater attendance, particularly from those who opposed the military action from the beginning. Several hon. Members on both sides of the House would have been telling us how futile it was, that bombing would never secure an agreement with Belgrade, that it was a disaster from the outset and that we should give up. The scene is quite different today, and I am very pleased that the military action has been successful.
As I said in my intervention during the speech of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, it is appropriate that the debate is taking place on a day when the broadsheets, at least, are reporting on their front page the horrifying atrocities carried out against civilians--men, women and children--who were ethnic Albanians. Those crimes remind one in so many respects of what the Nazis did during their occupation.
There was never any doubt in my mind that it would have been totally wrong if we had allowed what was happening in Kosovo to continue, without military action being taken. When the Foreign Secretary reported to the House on 18 January on the murder of 45 ethnic Albanians, I said that I did not believe that it would be possible to secure any agreement with Milosevic without air strikes. I would therefore be the last person to have criticised the decision in late March, following the failure of the negotiations in France, to take appropriate military action.
Of course it would have been preferable if that had been done through the United Nations, as the hon. Member for Mid-Sussex said. I have supported the United Nations from the beginning, if only because of my age. I have always been a firm supporter of the United Nations, and I hope that that will continue. However, the hon. Gentleman, like his colleagues and some of mine, knows that it would not have been possible to secure UN agreement.
If we could have achieved that at the Security Council, of course we would have done so. It would have been preferable, but as it was not possible, the alternative was to take the action that we took under NATO, or to take no action at all. That was the choice. There was no question of our ignoring the United Nations and saying that we were not interested in that organisation.
I do not believe that, apart from one or two clauses, Belgrade would have accepted the agreement on offer earlier this year in France. It has been claimed by some of my colleagues that it was annexe B that was so objectionable to the Belgrade regime, and that without it, there could have been agreement. I do not believe anything of the kind. Indeed, the Foreign Secretary pointed out that the Serbians did not focus particularly on annexe B during the negotiations in March. The fact is that Milosevic would have found it difficult to sell what would have been seen by the ultra-nationalists as a complete sell-out on Kosovo and, for that reason, he decided not to sign. If he thought, as obviously he did, that he could hold on to Kosovo, he was determined to do so.
This time round, an agreement was accepted, with much relief among the people in Serbia. We know why, apart from the ultra-nationalists, they are so relieved that the bombing has come to an end and agreement has been possible. The Guardian today reports on the reaction of various people in Belgrade. One 47-year-old woman is quoted as saying:
The critics have lost the argument over military action, although, perhaps not surprisingly among professional politicians, there is a reluctance to admit that. In our trade, we do not go out of our way to be self-critical, so I am not particularly surprised that those who have been proved wrong refuse to admit it.
Mr. Dalyell:
Will my hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Winnick:
Yes, because I was about to refer to my hon. Friend.
Mr. Dalyell:
There might be an apology from me. It would probably be an interim apology at the end of the Parliament, and then after five years.
Mr. Winnick:
Yes, I have heard about the five years on a previous occasion. There is one form of apology that my hon. Friend could make, and that is for his remarks on 13 April. In exchanges with the Prime Minister on Kosovo he mentioned a report on drugs by the German Federal Criminal Agency, backed by Scotland Yard, which, he said, points out
Unlike the critics, I do not use the position of Serbian civilians as a means of knocking NATO. I have just explained my position, which my hon. Friends have known about from the beginning of the military action. But I do say--this is where I agree with other hon. Members--that it is imperative that everything be done, both in words and deeds, to reassure the civilian Serbs in Kosovo that they have no less right to be there, and to be there in peace and safety, than the ethnic Albanians. There can be no question of a Serb-free Kosovo. I do not want that and it would be totally opposed to what we set out to achieve.
Who cannot understand the bitterness felt by so many of the majority community in Kosovo? The ethnic Albanians perhaps feel that all Serbs are guilty and that the civilian Serbs in Kosovo, if they were not involved in such crimes, did not do much to stop them. Nevertheless, the fact remains that most Serbian civilians there were not involved in such crimes, and that should be recognised.
The KLA must be brought under control, as soon and as urgently as possible. That organisation needs to know quickly that it must not be in the business of harassing, or worse, civilian Serbs and that it cannot have a structure that inflicts on civilian Serbs the feeling that their safety is continually being undermined. That is why there is an important responsibility for the NATO command to make sure that that happens in practice and that the civilian Serbs are duly protected in every way possible.
I understand the argument that aid will not be forthcoming for Serbia as long as Milosevic runs that country. He is a total opportunist. Those of us who watched the film about the way in which Yugoslavia disintegrated saw how he climbed on the nationalist platform and used the Serb minority in Kosovo to consolidate his rule in Belgrade. We know and understand that, and he must be held responsible for so many of the crimes that were committed--not only in Kosovo, but in Bosnia.
Despite that, and although I have only contempt for Milosevic, I have to say that a number of people in the political class in Serbia are against Milosevic, but for the wrong reasons. I have spoken, perhaps twice in all, to some of the demonstrators in Whitehall, who have been there from the beginning of the bombing. I found that, almost without exception, they are against Milosevic, but from an ultra-nationalist point of view. Indeed, they said, "He's a communist."
Instead of concluding, like us, that democracy is the option, and should be the choice, in Yugoslavia, those people have taken a very different point of view. They represent the most ultra-nationalist element in Belgrade. Although we condemn Milosevic--the politician who, above all, is responsible for the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and for what happened in Bosnia and Kosovo--we should not forget other elements in Serbia who are by no means democrats and no friends of the west.
Mr. John Randall (Uxbridge):
The hon. Gentleman's experience with the demonstrators outside Downing street may be slightly unfortunate. I have spoken to them on lots of occasions and many people there are committed to democracy. Many people who were with me in supporting the independent radio station B92 are bitterly opposed to Milosevic--from a democratic, not an ultra-nationalist,
"What was the point? What did [the war] achieve? It was madness."
Then she dropped her voice and said:
"It's a dangerous thing to say, but we should get rid of the president. He's been a disaster. If there was a protest tomorrow, I'd join it."
I have a great deal of respect for my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Mrs. Mahon). I hope that it is mutual. As it so happens, we disagreed over the Gulf war. But my hon. Friend seemed to say that there had been crimes of atrocity on all sides. No one denies that crimes have been committed in former Yugoslavia by all sides. The difference, as the Foreign Secretary emphasised, is the brutality and the systematic outrages and atrocities that we read about in the newspapers, particularly today. It is not sufficient for my hon. Friend simply to say that she is against Milosevic. I have never doubted that for one moment. She is as much a democrat as I am. But without military action there would have been no way in which we could have achieved what we set out to achieve--the ending of Serbian rule in Kosovo--for all the reasons that I and others have outlined.
"that the ethnic Albanian community is the most prominent group in Europe in the trafficking".--[Official Report, 13 April 1999; Vol. 329, c. 28.]
Is that not horrifying? If my hon. Friend had said that about blacks, Asians or Jews, there would have been outrage in the House. Should there not be similar outrage now? Here are a people who have been treated in the way I have just described, and that is how my hon. Friend considers it appropriate to refer to ethnic Albanians. That there are some among them, as among all people, who are criminals of one kind or another, is not in doubt, but my hon. Friend should not have phrased that in the way that he did. My hon. Friend talks about an apology, but an apology for those remarks would not come amiss.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |